How Does an MRI Help with Diagnosing Mental Disorders?

How Does an MRI Help with Diagnosing Mental Disorders? (1:15)

An MRI can confirm some mental health diagnoses, says HealthMaker Harold Koplewicz, MD, President of Child Mind Institute. In this video, he explains how collecting data from MRI and diagnoses helps in research.

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It's always a confirmation, you first have to make the diagnosis and now we have actually a device that can confirm, and the way we need to make the confirmation even more vigorous and more robust is we just need more data. So we need to collect the data on 10,000 kids, and that's one of the reasons the [xx] institute believes in big data and open science because we want different experts looking at these scans. You don't want just a child's psychiatrist or a radiologist, but we can show you proof of concept already that the brain of a child at risk using a functional MRIs of letting a child sleep or just rest.

There is a difference between the way the brain connects to itself if you have ADD versus Attention Deficit Disorder with hyperactivity versus having autism with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and that's really kind of amazing that we are capable of seeing differences in what parts of the brain are involved in different disorders.